"Last Tango in Paris" 7.5 out of 10. Bacon's paintings play a crucial role in this film. Whether it's the male protagonist's posture sleeping on the ground or the choice of clothes tones, they highly imitate the physical and spiritual distortions in Bacon's paintings. Numerous broken mirrors, blurred patterned glass, and labyrinthine apartments throughout the film create this sense of distortion. And the protagonists are also mentally broken. The male protagonist is a down-to-earth American living in Paris. Bertolucci here again uses the symbol of "container". The male protagonist is always in the darkness of the frame, and the whole darkness is like a huge container. The entire Western civilization emerged from this container. He was suppressed for too long, advocated division and differentiation, and made great progress all the way. Science and industry have become his carriers. The industrial revolution has brought great development of productivity, so he began to indulge in this. an image. After entering the 20th century, he continued to "break free". Obviously, this was "male", and he was trying to break free from the "maternal body". So the ultimate male image was born - America. But the slaughter and bloodshed of the two wars that followed and the panic of the nuclear crisis caused him to doubt himself. He stopped and could only force himself to calm down and return to the "maternal body". So he no longer differentiated, but turned to "fusion". People from the New World return to the Old World, and people from the outside have to live indoors for a long time. The countercultural movement that emerged in the 1960s and 1970s was undoubtedly a movement against differentiation, and he wanted a kind of "integrity". Sex is strongly rebellious, so the impact of sex is associated with deconstructing the capitalist system and questioning the morality of capitalism. Let's go back to Freud, where the apartment is the privileged seat of the survival instinct, while the death instinct rules the outside world. So the contradiction between primitive sex and human rationality is full of them, and this sense of distortion is born. The film also has a rebellion against traditional patriarchy. The female protagonist shot and killed the male protagonist who could be her father, and then fell into a deep question of "belonging", so the contradiction followed. On the one hand, people should strive to get rid of the traditional control imposed by their fathers on them. At the same time, it is a symbol of historical and geographical coordinates, a symbol of people's sense of belonging in that era. And the male protagonist giving up his name means that he is a person who lacks identity and refuses his identity, a person who has lost his belonging, and is also a representative and symbol of the decline of the golden age of the United States.
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